1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method of inhibiting information recording on a specific region of a recording medium or information reproduction therefrom and an information processing system therefor.
2. Related Background Art
Known conventional information recording media for recording medium individual information are an optical card using an additional storage type recording medium, disclosed in Japanese Laid-Open Patent Application No. 63-55784 and an IC card disclosed in Japanese Laid-Open Patent Application No. 63-136296. Magnetic cards popularly used as banking cards are also exemplified as the above information recording media. To guarantee personal privacy and prevent illegal modifications, several methods are proposed in these cards for recording medium individual information. For example, the following method is known as a method of preventing the illegal modifications of an optical card. To record information on the optical card, a laser beam is focused and radiated on the recording medium to form pits corresponding to the recording information. In a reproduction mode, a read laser beam scans a pit array to read the presence/absence of a pit as a change in intensity of reflected light.
When security of an optical card is taken into consideration on the basis of the above recording/reproducing principle, the pit array recorded on the optical card can be observed with a microscope or the like. For this reason, the recorded information may be read, but must be prevented from being decoded. For this purpose, a method of converting original data to be recorded into another data using, e.g., an "8-10 conversion table" to record the converted data on the optical card is available. A method of rearranging original data in error correction can also be used together with the above method. The above data processing is performed inside an optical card recording/reproducing apparatus. However, similar data conversion processing and data rearrangement processing can be performed in an external apparatus installed with application software.
A function of copying information recorded in an optical card between two optical card recording/reproducing apparatuses is also available. This copy function is utilized when the memory capacity of an external apparatus is smaller than that of an optical card or when a back-up optical card is formed to improve operating efficiency of an external apparatus due to the absence of the external apparatus during the copy operation. The above copy function is started by a copy command transmitted from the external apparatus to the optical card recording/reproducing apparatus, and then data is exchanged between the first optical card recording/reproducing apparatus as a data transmission source mounted with an optical card recorded with original data and the second optical card recording/reproducing apparatus mounted with a blank optical card, thereby executing a copy operation.
In recent years, standardization of optical cards has been discussed. With this trend, optical card recording/reproducing apparatuses are expected to be standardized in the near future. When this standardization is put into practice, recording/reproducing formats are disclosed to the public. Under such circumstances, none of the conventional prevention methods are effective except the method using passwords. Otherwise, the guarantee of privacy and prevention of illegal modifications must rely on countermeasures in the external apparatus installed with application software. When a password is not recorded, or when medium individual information is recorded in the manufacture of an optical card and a password and an ID number are recorded after this optical card is issued to a person, this may invite an illegal operation of copying the optical card before it is issued to the person. If the copy function is illegally used in the optical card recording/reproducing apparatus having this copy function, an optical card can be easily and illegally copied, resulting in inconvenience.